The bad news from Afghanistan continues. The seemingly minor accidental burning of a handful of Qurans is a serious setback to U.S. interests/goals, and to the Aghan people's hopes of breaking out of medievality. (Incidentally those two are not necessarily related. I don't entertain the foolish notion that anything the U.S. is or has been doing in Afghanistan was going to make a real difference in modernizing or democratizing that country.)
As is often the case in such international incidents, there is fault everywhere you look.
The Afghan brand of Islam: The current eruption brings home the depth and breadth of ignorance and superstition in this benighted land -- a true illustration of how religion can be the opiate of the masses, especially when the masses have nothing else. Riot and murder because of a plain old mistake/failure of understanding? Islam is still a relatively young religion; I like to point out that when Christianity was roughly the age Islam is now, Christians were persecuting each other horrifically (e.g. in the notorious Spanish inquisition) and persecuting other religions too (e.g. the Crusades). Islam can grow up to be no less harmful than Roman Catholicism or Presbyterianism, as is shown by pockets of rational Islamists here and there in the U.S. and Europe; but in Afghanistan it has a long way to go.
U.S. Military: OK, this was "just" a mistake, but it reflects a serious failure in the education of our troops; not so much at the grunt level as at the officer level; and also among State Department advisors (I assume there are some) at that location. The thing about errors is that they can't be retrieved, and apologies go only so far. The facility commander where this occurred ought to have been relieved; I haven't heard that that has happened. Unfortunately the U.S. military seems to have backed away from the strict concept of the CO's credo that prevailed during my exposure to service: "The commander is responsible for everything his unit does or fails to do." Absolutely.
Afghan Leadership: While we might hope that there are adults in charge, there isn't much evidence. President Karzai and others haven't been courageous enough to speak out strongly against the violence, because they're afraid of the Taliban, which in turn is helping to exacerbate and escalate the situation. So he will likely continue to play to the extremes; it's a political tactic not unknown in our own country!
U.S. Strategy Planners: Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his recent book Strategic Vision, makes some cogent points about the folly of the U.S. getting involved in military ground wars in Asia; a little bit of history - for example, Peter Hopkirk's classic book The Great Game, which reports uprisings against the British in the mid-nineteenth century that are eerily similar to what's happening right now - is also enlightening. Here, the failure lies with the Bush administration. If politically we did need to go in and bash the Taliban, we also needed an exit plan. Not only didn't we have one but we just left our troops in place for several years with no real end game strategy.
U.S. Foreign Policy Planners: Again with the history! Vietnam. "Winning hearts and minds" is a game for idiots. It's hopelessly idealistic to suppose that we will ever get away from it entirely, but we need to be far more careful in our assessments. It works best when the target population already shares our core values (the French welcomed U.S. troops with open arms at the end of WWII). It can work pretty well when values and cultures are different, too -- when we are a victorious occupying force (Japan) with carte blanche to reorganize a country. Otherwise, winning hearts and minds too often turns into buying hearts and minds, with development projects or military assistance that often fails miserably because the cultural gap is too great - check out the interesting assessment of our efforts in Iraq offered by Peter VanBuren in We Meant Well.
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